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| © Galen Rowell/Mountain Light. All rights reserved. |
| Click the photo to see more images like this one, "Rainbow over the Potala Palace, Lhasa, Tibet." |
The mystique of outdoor photographer Galen Rowell has always seemed equal parts photography and adventure. In retrospect, though, the latter sometimes outweighed the former during his sadly shortened career. Rowell's adventure credentials were indisputable, but his pure landscapes -- as opposed to his wildlife and mountain-climbing images -- verged on sentimental in their rendering. His best photographs needed a figure, or at least the suggestion of a human presence, to make his point that nature was both a belittling and an awe-inspiring spectacle. His signature use of the split neutral density filter, a photographic tool that can impart a kind of artifice to the natural world, seemed driven more by a wish to make a scene conform to his deep feeling for its beauty than by the need to solve a technical problem in order to present its truth.
All that said, the critical mass of images in Galen Rowell: A Retrospective (Sierra Club Books, $50) shows that on balance Rowell was a superb photographer. The first full accounting of his life's work, it contains over 175 wonderfully edited and handsomely reproduced images, a selection from which is featured here. (Click to launch gallery.) But it isn't just a picture book: It includes rich tributes and reminiscences from Rowell's colleagues in the different worlds he straddled, from journalism to mountaineering, including essays by newsman Tom Brokaw, mountaineer Conrad Anker, and critic Andy Grundberg. In one of the most moving and intelligent contributions, which we reproduce in its entirety on the following page, fellow photographer Frans Lanting paints Rowell as a transcendentalist in motion -- a philosopher who actually lived his ideas.
Indeed, for Rowell photography was part of a larger agenda that included nothing less than saving the earth, and in his hands it seemed attainable. His own words explain: "Over the course of hundreds of visits to wildlands on seven continents, I have yet to find any place saved strictly by the vote of a democratic majority or the benevolence of a government. Passionate individuals have always played a leading role." Looking back, we can certainly count Rowell among those passionate individuals.
-- Russell Hart
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